Codename:Kids Next Door Operation:BIOSHOCK
by Bioweapon 155
Summary: Nigel and his team have survived the full force of adult tyranny on the surface. But can they hold their own against the madness of the city beneath the waves? And can they escape unscarred from the monstrosity of ADAM?
1. Chapter 1

**I do not own neither Bioshock, nor Codename Kids Next Door.**

**I had this Idea sulking round mah head for so long it was beginning to be rather distracting, so I'll use it to relieve my writer's block every now and then. So don't expect frequent updates.**

**Enjoy.**

**

* * *

  
**

_Loading Codename: Kids Next Door Operation: B.I.O.S.H.O.C.K._

_**B**iologicaly_

_**I**ngineered_

_**O**perative_

_**S**urvivors_

_**H**ave_

_**O**ccasionally_

_**C**aused_

_**K**aos_

_Initiating transmission..._

_Timeline: one year ago_

* * *

Somewhere, not beyond but quite near the middle of the northern Atlantic ocean, there was a lighthouse of an elegant, modern design, rising suddenly and unexpectedly from the deep. It's location, far away from any coast worth mentioning or any hazard that a ship might encounter, was quite odd, and one couldn't help wonder what it's purpose was.

The people who were standing on the conveniently-built pier alongside the lighthouse had no doubt about its purpose. They were mostly employees of one or another of many enterprises owned by the greatest millionaire of the century, Andrew Ryan. If not, then they were either friends of Ryan or family of someone on his payroll.

Another privately owned boat docked on the pier, released a small amount of passengers, and serenely puttered off. Amongst the passengers, a mustachioed, balding middle-aged man with bushy eyebrows spotted a friend of his in the small crowd. Smiling, he called out his name and soon he was having a pleasant conversation. After a minute, they spotted another friend of theirs and, after but a short while there was a small group of middle aged adults pleasantly conversing about how the trip went, the weather and, after a quick check of each others tickets, how odd it was that they would all be going to Rapture on the same trip.

Some distance from them, another small group, this one of children, was having a completely different conversation.

One of them, a short, blonde boy in baggy blue jeans and an orange hoodie, scanned the horizon with green eyes, frowned and announced, his voice heavy in a thick Australian accent:

"Oy still don't see no cruddy city!"

One of his companions, a dark-skinned girl in blue with braided brown hair responded by slapping him on the head with a red cap. Putting the accessory back on her head, she said, in a tired voice that sounded like it had had repeated the same thing over and over again:

"Numbah five _told_ you that dah city's underwater!"

"But if it unduhwatuh, 'ow ar we suhposed teh breathe?!" the short blond demanded, throwing his hands up in the air for an extra amount of emphasis.

The girl gave a pleading look to a fat boy dressed in a blue shirt and brown pants, an aviator's cap and goggles covering his head and eyes. The boy sighed and said in a tiring voice:

"Just wait Numbuh four, you'll see."

The Australian was about to insist, when he was interrupted by a fourth member of their group.

"Numbuh four! This is no time to be getting on other's nerves!" commanded a curiously bald boy, dressed in a red long-sleeved shirt and brown shorts, a sharp British accent adding authority to his voice and stern eyes looking though a pair of sunglasses and. He crossed his arms and continued "Remember, this is a very important mission. Command barely managed to learn that this place even existed! This might just be the most important mission of our childhood, understand?" the others nodded in appreciation. "We are to establish a Kids Next Door headquarters in this "Rapture". Numbuh two, do you have the plans ready?"

The fat kid grinned and gave a smart salute, "Ready as they'll ever be boss!" he bragged.

The leader gave a satisfied smile "Good, this should be no problem at --"

"Ooh, this is going to be so fun!"

The bald leader glared at the source of this statement, something which went unnoticed by the raven-haired Asian girl, who was too busy talking to a smiling monkey-like doll, dressed like a Ship's Captain.

"Don't you think, Captain Intrepid Rainbow Monkey?" she asked the doll, who said nothing, and giggled. The bad kid ran his hand down his face, rest of the children simply shrugged.

At that moment, a man dressed in a red suit, not unlike a bellboy at a hotel, emerged from the lighthouse's heavy gates and starting calling out ticket numbers

"Numbah five's got a bad feelin' about this..." the girl blue couldn't help but say as their tickets were called.

The rotund young aviator gave her a playful punch on the shoulder, "Come on Numbuh five!" he grinned, eyes gleaming behind his goggles, "What's the worst that could happen?"

* * *

**Methinks Numbuh two invoked thy Law of Murphy.**

**Antone familiar with Bioshock would probably know what "the worst that could happen" is.**

**Goodbye and goodnight!**


	2. Going down

**I own nothing minus the plot...and the T.E.S.L.A.C.A.N.N.O.N.**

**Last chapter was ridiculously short. Let's remedy that.**

_

* * *

_

_Sector V didn't take long to realize just how different Rapture was from anywhere else in the world. The very first thing they found about was plasmids, and soon everyone wanted one. Numbuh one gave them a long lecture about plasmids, and the rest of his team listened, nodded, and bought some anyway._

* * *

Numbuh one was sitting on a big red armchair in the newly-built lounge of their base, reviewing the last bunch of papers that needed to be sent to moonbase when he was violently interrupted by something that sounded like a T.E.S.L.A.C.A.N.N.O.N. going off.

He looked up in alarm, and stared at the sight of Numbuh four playing with what appeared to be a large electrical spark.

Behind him, Kuki was making Rainbow monkeys out of ice.

A little to the left, he spotted Numbuh two juggling some tools in midair.

Sitting up in a flash, Numbuh one summoned his best leader voice and shouted:

"I thought I TOLD you not to get into those things!!"

"Relax Numbuh one!", Numbuh two laughed "Plasmids are perfectly safe!, And besides, they're pretty useful!"he added, making the tools float to a nearby table where they laid themselves out neatly.

"Heh, oy'd love to kick some adult butt woith this!" Numbuh four chuckled, making lightning spark from his hands.

Behind his sunglasses, Numbuh one frantically searched the area for his usual source of support. Finding it, he noticed something odd about Numbuh five; the way she wasn't looking in his direction, the innocent-yet-suspicious way she was moving her foot, the fact that she was just standing there, trying to pass unnoticed...

Somehow keeping his despair out of his voice, he asked his second-in command "Numbuh five, please tell me you didn't..."

Numbuh five crossed her arms, froze, and seemingly vanished into thin air.

"Yup," said the Abby-shaped block of air where Numbuh five had just been "Numbuh five did."

Numbuh one slid back into his seat, giving a great exasperated sigh as he did so.

What was he ever going to do with these four...

_

* * *

_

_Rapture's lack of ethics, except those associated with things like murder, made it a haven for scientists that had been shunned on the surface. The technical advances were such that sector V had to constantly resort to methods like downright thievery, just to remain inconspicuous. Fontaine's death was just a minor headline for them, because, as Numbuh one put it "It's just a stupid adult getting it's butt kicked by another stupid adult."_

_In all, things seemed to be going rather well, until New year's eve, just a few months after they had arrived in Rapture..._

* * *

While their parents were away having their new year's party at the Kashmir, sector V had it's own little celebration. It mostly consisted of watching cartoon until late at night, eating junk food and drinking lots of soda that one of them had mixed with unknown liquor (the lack of alcohol restriction had appeared as a bit odd to the operatives at first, and after their first embarrassing brush with what the advert had named as a "child-safe" version, they had all agreed that drinking would only be in special occasions, and only when mixed with something else).

Numbuh 1 was sitting in an armchair that felt almost, but not entirely exactly like the one the treehouse they had back on the surface. Despite the precautions with the accursed liquid, he did not feel entirely well, and had to sit down for a moment before he determined he would hide the rest of the spiked soda and "kid safe" alcohol in the drainpipes and replace it with root beer, which would only give him a sugar rush and not a headache the size of twenty raging maths assignments, which was what he felt was coming.

Knowing that his mood tomorrow was doomed to be unpleasant, he turned on the giant TV, hoping some cartoons would liven him up and distract him from his imminently horrible day. Instead of the cartoons, though, what he found was a rather alarmed sounding man screaming into his microphone as doctors and armed adults rushed behind him.

"_..the splicers swarmed the place before anyone could do anything about it!" _he screamed, a panic-stricken look invading his face, _"It was a massacre! The walls of the Kashmir have been splattered in blood! I...I can't even begin to describe it! And reports are coming in that simillar attacks are being realized all over the city.",_ the man swiped his brow, he was sweating profusely.

"_Were there any survivors?"_, the anchorwoman, not nearly as appalled, asked.

Nigel felt the rest of sector V hold their breaths behind him.

The Rapture News guy seemed to collect himself, and shook his head, _"No, everyone who was at the restaurant is dead."_

Immediately, hell broke loose as the children dropped everything and rushed for the pneumatic elevator that would take them to Nigel's room, and from there to the Kashmir.

_

* * *

_

_As they plodded back from the morgue, they were all too wrapped up in their individual mourning to notice that, somewhere along the way Kuki had gone missing. As they mulled over her disappearance back at the base , they all came to the same grim conclusion as to where she had gone._

_Where all the little girls whose parents could not afford the tax needed to keep them out of the Little Sister program went._

_A week later, Numbuh five saw her while looking for supplies at the Farmer's Market, skipping through the street, her new best friend lumbering beside her._

_After the attack on the Kashmir, people flew into a frenzy of paranoia, buying as many plasmids as their wallets allowed, the remaining sector V included (sans Numbuh one, who didn't trust plasmids any farther than he would throw a truck). Almost at once, this led to an even higher violence rate, to the point when groups of people would simply strangle each other in the streets. _

_This was all, of course, due to the fact that plasmids didn't only shape the users body, they also changed one's mind._

_This all became very apparent when, without any warning at all, Numbuh five attacked them._

* * *

It was a normal day at the base.

Fires, murders, terrified people and bloodthirsty maniacs raged and screamed outside as the remaining Sector V operatives tried to find out a way out of this mess.

Numbuh five was on her bed, shaking. Being the one with the Natural Camouflage tonic, she was the one Numbuh one tended to send out for food and other things.

Stealing food from those poor salespeople had stopped feeling wrong a long time ago. Although lately, she had contemplated doing more than just steal food from them. As for what that meant, her mind drew a blank.

Right now, however, she had used half of what she had stolen from a cash register to buy more than a hundred and fifty ADAM, and had injected it in to her before she could even get out of Farmer's Market. She gave the rest of the money to Numbuh one, saying that it was all she could find. The bald British kid had looked doubtful, but said nothing and put the money, three hundred Dollars, into the safe.

Now, even after all that ADAM, Numbuh five found herself wanting more, a gnawing hunger chewing away at her insides as she lay on her bed, curled up in to a ball so tight one could have found it impossible to straighten her out.

Delirium racked her brain, in her feverish dreams, she saw glowing rivers of ADAM run through a bizarre red-hued field of grass, strange trees whose leaves were hypodermic needles dotted the landscape, towering like oaks. Yesterday, she would have considered a sunlit landscape, or a starry moonlit sky as something beautiful enough to deserve an hallucination. Right now, however, her mind had no space left in it but for the thought of that beautiful red-gold liquid.

She was suddenly aware that Numbuh two had entered the room.

"Geez Numbuh five, you okay?"

His words went in and out of her head, their meaning lost in the convoluted jungle that was her mind.

A single thought sorted itself out from the mess:

"_Numbuh two's got ADAM."_

In a blink, she sat up straight and stared at the rotund boy standing in the doorway.

"_He has ADAM. I know it. He has it. He's been kepin' it all for himself that little..."_

"Um, Numbuh five?"

"_NumbuhtwoADAMhehasithehasitHEHASITGIVEITTOME!!!"_

In a single bound, she cleared the the room, colliding into Numbuh two and sending them both sprawling to the ground, where she screamed at him, pummeling, biting and clawing at the squealing boy.

The rest of the children took only a moment to react to her attack. Someone yanked her off the immensely hurt Numbuh two, her fingers fighting to keep hold of him. Spinning around, she glared at whoever it had been that had laid his hands on her.

Numbuh one backpedaled until he was a good distance from her, and drew a ticked-out pistol.

Abby ignored his demand for an explanation and took a step forward. Numbuh one fire, the gun's report sounding ridiculously loud in the enclosed space as he fired at her feet.

She paid no heed to the bullet that had impacted the ground a few inches from her foot. She heard the distinct cackle of Numbuh four willing his Electrobolt to life behind her.

"_ADAMNumbuhoneNumbuhfourhasADAMhe'sbeenkeepi'nitalltohimselfADAMADAMADAM."_

Screaming like a banshee, she whirled around and pounced on Numbuh four, getting blasted with electricity for her troubles. Her former comrades heaved her convulsing form and threw her into the pneumatic elevator that led to Numbuh one's old apartment in Mercury suites. The image of their confused and frightened faces registered in her mind long after the hatch shut.

She stumbled out of the tube, and tried to get back down until, bored and disappointed, she wandered of into the city, looking for ADAM.

_

* * *

_

_Nearly a month later, they found Abby, now a Spider splicer, sobbing on the floor of the bathysphere station. She gave no struggle as they brought her back to the base, and bit by painful bit, slowly reformed her._

_They had nearly gotten used to their hopeless situation when the KND Moonbase computer emitted a Decommission order._


	3. Welcome to Rapture

**T****erribly, **_**terribly **_**sorry about the delay, it's just that I've lost the USB drive I keep this thing in, so I had to start the absurdly long chapter I wrote from scratch. Ha, ha.**

…**Then I recovered the drive, and said: "Let's use this fancy tool in Word to combine both versions and see what happens!"**

**Ha, ha. Oh-so-very HA, HA!**

**Oh, and I own nothing of what I describe here, minus the plot itself. Get off mah lawn, frikkin' lawyers!**

**

* * *

**

Abigail Lincoln stared into the puddle.

The image in the water's still surface, that of a lanky pre-teen in an orange-red grimy jumpsuit with the legs cut off at the ankle and the sleeves rolled past the elbow, bandages covering her hands, her feet and her face; stared back at her with bloodshot eyes.

Her fingers gripped a pair of large meat hooks tightly, almost as if they have been grafted into being that way, twitching on occasion. A battered red cap, dotted with bullet-holes and soot marks and small splotches of dried blood, was perched on her head, a dirty ponytail was threaded through the loop in the back.

A radio was clipped to a belt on her thigh, and a bunch of leather pouches had been tied to her waist on a belt that had had some extra holes punched into it, rather crudely.

The water rippled, and Abby's eyes darted up from the ground and feverishly searched her surroundings. The stalls of the Farmer's market, the rotting food, the trash, the bodies…

A lone Big Daddy wandered round the corner, and Abby put him…_it…_ under the "really seriously ignore" category.

One did not want to mess with a Daddy, especially not a single Spider Splicer, and _especially_ if there was not much of a reward for the herculean feat. Abby was still certifiably insane, but she was not stupid.

Although her friends would probably have voiced the idea out loud: Numbuh One because he would have the suspicion that the thing was following them, Numbuh Two because the Big Daddy had some sort of critically vital component for whatever he was doing and only that specific hulking monstrosity, and not something that wouldn't fill you with holes of painful sizes, would do as a supplier.

Numbuh Four…Numbuh Four would have just wanted something to beat up, period.

Abby had a vague idea of who the three of them were; she only had a few snippets of who they were in her memory. They seemed to know her though, and insisted on calling her either Abby or "Numbuh Five", something the more reasonable half of the voices also did.

She sneaked behind a long-forgotten counter, sat down into the dirt and tiles of the floor and froze. She immediately seemed to disappear, only a faint outline gave a clue that she was still there. She and Numbuh One had been looking for Numbuh Four for the last few hours, and she was exhausted.

You see, Abby had been given the job of being the supplier of the group, being the sneaky one with the Natural Camouflage tonic. Of course, since she wasn't completely cured from being a Splicer, there were times she went completely nuts. So they would have to lock her up in her room. Usually when that happened, Numbuh One was the guy who did the rounds, but this time, the very stupid Australian had decided he could do the job as well as anyone, so he took her map, which was useless to anyone who couldn't crawl on ceilings, and left despite Numbuh Two's better judgment and Numbuh One's now-justified paranoia.

He immediately got horribly, astronomically lost.

So now she and Numbuh One where looking for the squat Aussie. Abby had firmly decided to hang Numbuh Four from the biggest tree in Arcadia when she found him.

The radio in her messenger's bag crackled to life. She froze, before darting for cover in the shadows above her. She longed for Numbuh Two to invent a radio that was anything close to stealthy.

She unclipped the radio and clicked it on.

"Talk ta me" she said, her voice oddly muffled by the bandages.

Hoagie's voice, slightly distorted by static, came over the speaker. _"Hello? Home base here, any luck finding Wally?"_

"Nah, he ain't here in the farmer's market." she said.

"_Just got Numbuh one on the radio, I think he says he's over at Prometheus."_

"Did he get any luck?"

_Please find him. Pleasepleaseplease find him or Abby'll KILL him when she does._

"_Nope."_

_Ha! So that's your so-called "leader? I've seen better. you've seen better. I don't know why you don't do us all a favour and slit Baldy's ne-_

_They're lying. They're all lying. They don't know you, you don't know them. Get away. Run. RunleavethemleavethemLEAVE-_

_ADAM. They have ADAM. They're hiding it from you. You know they have it. You need it. You always need it. ADAMADAMADAMADAMA-_

Numbuh five held her head as her mind was suddenly overrun with a cacophony of voices.

_'REHIDINGITFROMYUOKILLTHEMALL-_

Numbuh five switched the radio off and screamed.

"SHUT UP! ALL OF YOU!"

The unbearable noise in her head immediately ceased, and she quickly left her position on the ceiling, quickly climbing through ventilation shafts before emerging in another of the closed up stores of the farmers market. Making noise in Rapture was a bad idea, unless you were a two-ton behemoth with a drill and an attitude.

Checking and double-checking to be sure she was safe, Abby switched the radio back on, keeping herself where she was with her legs and other arm.

"Talk ta me."

"_Geez Numbuh five, can't you get your feet on the ground?"_

The silence afterwards indicated that that was supposed to have been a pun.

Numbuh five ground her teeth. "Ha, ha Hoagie, very funny. Yo' say **one** more of those stupid jokes and Numbah five will..."

_Murder! Shish-kebab!_

"_Okay, okay! Sheesh..."_ He quickly apologized _"Well, Nigel says he's run out of ideas. Where do you think he's gone?"_

Abby scratched her head, and poured through her shabby and fuzzy mind. From what she remembered of her acquaintances, Numbuh Four had more physical tonics than was good for him and behaved more like a splicer thug than anything else.

_Like a very, very stupid splicer thug._

A funny thing about splicers was that they hated any sort of change in what went on around them. Put a chair someplace it hadn't been before and they'd go nuts.

_Ahem._

Well, worse that what they were before.

So, it wasn't particularly weird for splicers to end up wandering around certain places, just because they felt familiar. She made it a hobby to go around, following splicers at random, simply because she could.

So, knowing the stupid Australian, he would be...

Abby blinked, her train of thought ran into a wall in her mind and exploded.

_Stupid ADAM..._

She whispered into the radio. "Eh, Numbuh two?"

"_Yes?"_

"Um... before all this happened, wuz there some place that Numbuh four liked to go to?"

"_Well... there's the Marathon sports complex that went under __last Tuesday and the _Le fromage _cheese factory, and you know what happened __there__."_

Abby winced; the incident at the cheese factory, involving a baseball bat, four tons of mozzarella, a net, a grenade lobbing splicer and a Rosie Big Daddy was something that would best be left in the dark. So that was out too.

"_...and there's also the videogame store at Volta Electronics. Why do you want to know, anyway?"_ Hoagie continued.

"'Cuz Numbah five thinks that's where the frikin' idiot will be."

* * *

Meanwhile, someplace quite far from where Sector V had holed up, something was lurking around.

A small underwater craft, craftily made from what others would have thought of as trash, was making its way through the underwater metropolis. Its single occupant, despite her efforts not to be so, was very impressed with the beautiful city. As she guided the submarine between buildings, she remembered her mission, and directed the submersible towards one of the massive underwater skyscrapers, chosen at random.

She brought neither backup, nor communications, because she was the best operative for the job.

Or, at least, that's what Fanny Fullbright liked to think and say.

The submersible rammed one of the windows on the Rapture metro station.

* * *

Abby crawled on the ceiling on the second floor of the Kashmir restaurant, humming a meaningless, tuneless tune to herself as she did.

Numbuh two had told her that Nigel would be the one to go to Volta's, since he was closer. That left her with a lot of time on her hands, and little to do, something she was quite familiar with. Being survivors in the worst city in the world was actually quite boring. As long as you knew what you were doing and got a bit lucky, you would survive; Sort of.

If you didn't, you would be better off getting ready to be another of the corpses that were all over the place, or "angels", like the Little sisters like to call them.

Abby shivered; getting better or not, the mere thought of those little bags of ADAM still made her mouth water and her mind ache at the thought of the red-gold liquid. The fact that her friends told her that the former fifth member of their group was one of them did little to help.

Speaking of Kuki, what was she supposed to look like, anyway?

The others had tried to describe her to her, but every time she thought she had it right, her mind slipped, and blurred everything again. It was the same story for all the other things they talked about: school, mountains, snow, rain, the sun, the surface, the sky...

It was incredibly frustrating.

Right now, however, she had successfully banished those thoughts from her head. She anchored one of her hooks into the crumbling concrete, tied a rope from pouch to it, tied another hook to the opposite end and secured that one into the ceiling as well. Carefully, she lowered herself onto her makeshift swing, taking in the rare peace around her. The others never came here, for some reason she didn't really understand. She, on the other hand, always found the restaurant, usually devoid of squabbles, quite comforting.

Today was as peaceful as it was going to get, the sound of the water below, the sight of the city in the panoramic windows, the soft music endlessly playing in the jukebox, and the statue of Atlas (the Greek one, not the Irish Atlas they knew was hiding somewhere) holding the world on his shoulders. Even the couple that lived in the kitchen was being quiet in their argument.

Abby closed her eyes, taking in the sound she simply couldn't get enough of: Silence.

_CRASH!_

Abby snapped her eyes open to the cacophonic sound of glass and steel breaking and bending somewhere else and stayed there, shock-still.

Her mind gave.

* * *

Numbuh 86, head of Decommissioning, climbed out of the S.U.B.S.T.A.N.D.A.R.D. she had crashed through the wall and gazed around, perplexed.

Behind her, the submarine inflated a pair of A-tubes to make a watertight seal with the glass and steel of the wall, but she neither noticed it nor cared.

What she did notice and care about was how awfully silent the place was. You could hear a pin drop.

She took out her standard-issue S.C.A.M.P.P. and switched on the flashlight, scanning the room like a SWAT officer.

The room was a bit more massive than she thought of at first, with a huge pool of water covering the last three quarters of it. Three ring shaped platforms were lined up near the edge of the pool, linked to dry ground by short causeways, nearly all of which were busted.

That was what worried her the most. She had expected a handful of bumbling adults rushing about at her entrance, not an empty room in an obvious state of disrepair. The place was also as creepy as heck.

She almost went back into the sub.

Almost.

Fanny was way too proud and sure of her own abilities to back out of this mission. She ignored the warnings seeping in the air and set off to find Sector V's base.

Somewhere in the shadows above her, someone whispered.

"Is it someone new?"

* * *

Abby was raging mad. Or, more accurately, the bits and pieces of her that were still awake were raging mad.

Like some sort of screaming homing missile, she made a beeline to the bathysphere station. Whoever had made all that racket would be extremely sorry in a few moments.

She skidded into the dark and creepy confines of the dock area and stared at the thing jutting out of the steel and glass of the window, water leaking in through the cracks. A door in the thing opened up a crack and she jumped up, into the shadows.

From the whatever-it-was down below, someone had emerged, holding a curious-looking weapon in its hands. Abby hooked a rope to the ruins overhead and lowered herself as closely as she dared. It was a girl, probably not much older than any of the Little Sisters she had seen, with frizzy red hair poking out of the colander she wore as a helmet. The newcomer switched on a flashlight attached to her weapon and gave a quick scan of her surroundings, before striding purposefully to the waiting room.

Curious, Abby followed her from the ceiling.

"Is it someone new?" she wondered out loud.

* * *

The lights flickered in what must have been the place where people wait for their plane. Or submarine. Or whatever they used here.

A big board showed that all of the trips had been delayed. And a poster on the wall said that all bathysphere travel had been denied.

"Stoopid adults..." Fanny scoffed, and climbed up and over some debris, through an automatic door, up some stairs and into some sort of lounge. A big window showed off the city in all its glory, and a model of said city drove the point home, just in case someone dared say; perish the thought, that it wasn't awesome enough.

Despite the suspicious air around the whole thing, even she couldn't help but be impressed by the magnificent metropolis. Maybe she was just in the crummy bit of it.

She pulled a lever set in to the wall and a big, heavy door slid up with a grind; a glass tunnel snaked ahead of her. She plodded on.

The tunnel, after a while, split. One path headed left, the other kept going straight ahead. She paused, shrugged, and chose the latter.

She emerged in a dark room; another vault-like door lay ahead. Two walls, broken at the ends closest to the doors, split the room in three; the left and right bits were lower than the centre of the room.

Water flooded those bits.

She saw someone sitting on the bit that was on the right, against another floor to ceiling window.

She snapped the S.C.A.M.P.P. into ready position. "Don't move!" she barked.

The figure obediently didn't move a muscle.

Keeping her sights on the silhouette, she approached it.

"What the crud is going on here?" she asked.

The guy chose to remain silent.

She moved closer water splashing at her feet"I said, _what the crud is going on?_" she hissed.

Nothing, she switched the flashlight back on and she saw that the man's head was hung, as if he were sleeping.

She moved as close as she dared and gave the sleeping adult a good kick.

"Oy! I'm talkin' to-"

The guy had just fallen over. It only took one short look at the man's face for her to realize that he was very, very dead.

She screamed, jumping away from the corpse as if its death were somehow contagious.

Something splashed behind her, and she twirled around and fired her S.C.A.M.P.P., squeezing of the shots so fast it sounded like a machine gun, screaming all the while.

She caught the lanky teen with a bandage covered face by surprise, knocking whoever it was out cold.

Fanny continued aiming the weapon at the crumpled figure. She approached it, still hyperventilating. Bandages covered most of her face, but one look at the bright red cap and she knew she was looking at.

Birthday girl.

Quickly producing a pair of handcuffs, she quickly locked her detainee's hands behind her back and and, eager to take advantage or her lucky capture, pulled the unconscious teen in the direction she had come from.

* * *

Abby was off in some faraway, ADAM-filled dream when she became suddenly aware that she was being dragged along the ground.

Instinct told her to cut the offender into teeny tiny pieces, and she was about to, when she took notice that her hands were cuffed together.

Instinct now told her to panic.

Wildly twisting her body, she wrenched herself from her capturer's surprised grasp and managed to flip herself to her feet. She started to run, but a concussive blast of energy hit her back nearly knocking her over.

"Don't move ya cruddy teen!"

Abby forced herself to stay still. Like she said, she was crazy, not stupid; she knew when running and fighting got useless, being sneaky became very useful.

So she stayed rock still, save for some small movements to keep the good ol' Natural Camouflage tonic from activating. It could be pretty useful in giving her captor the slip later on and she didn't want to give away any advantages she might have.

"Good, now turn around!"

Abby did, coming to face with her captor.

It was a child, a girl to be precise, not much younger than Abby herself, although she wasn't a Little Sister, much to Abby's dismay.

Then she recognized her as the newcomer she saw in her recent slip of mind.

Her eyes widened between the bandages. She had to tell the others; now. Slowly, inching her hand as best as she could, she felt for her radio, it was predictably gone.

She looked back at her capturer and saw that she was holding the radio in her hand. The redhead teasingly held it out, a smug smirk on her face. Abby threw herself at her.

"_Give that back!_"

The redhead sidestepped her charge; Abby quickly twisted herself in midair, her feet sticking to the wall like a spider as she coiled like a spring, and flung herself again at her capturer. The newcomer, taken by surprise this time, yelped as Abby crashed headfirst onto her, the radio clattering onto the ground. Abby rolled of her opponent and squirmed her way to the radio, turning her back to it so as to try to operate the thing while handcuffed.

Static came from the device's speaker; looking around she finally recognized the place as the airlock foyer, which was beyond Hoagie's radio range.

Wasting no time in recovering, her captor had regained her footing and aimed her with the bizarre weapon she had.

"Ok, that's IT you stoopid teenager! You're coming with me!" the redhead screamed.

"But-"

"NO BUTS! I'm SICK of this place! So you're gonna be a nice little teenager and come with me for your Decommissioning!"

"Numbah five's got no idea what you're talkin' abou-"

"Oh _sure_ you don't!" she mocked, "I've heard that excuse like eleventy billion times!" she went and forced her to stand up- "Now MOVE!" she screamed, keeping a firm grip on Abby's arm.

Abby stayed silent as they traversed the tunnel leading to the bathysphere station, thinking of a way to overpower her captor once they got inside the submarine and feeling for the lock pick she kept in one sleeve.

_Left._

_Right._

_Left._

_Right._

_LEFT!_

_RIGHT!_

The door to the station lounge opened, and Abby was struck with a vague sense of familiarity. Had she been here before?

Although it could just as well have been the splicer standing in the middle of the room, with a wooden box cradled in his arms.

The three of them paused all of three seconds. And then the splicer threw a home-made grenade at them.

"Get away from me!"

Abby threw herself to the ground, pulling the redhead down behind her. The explosive sailed over them and into the tunnel, where in exploded, cracking the thick glass. Water dribbled in, but the glass thankfully held.

The explosive-lobbing psycho dropped a smoke grenade, screaming all the while.

"He loves me! The Lord LOVES ME!"

Abby struggled to get up, coughing from the smoke. The grenade freak was gone. Abby was going to be bit thankful, until it dawned on her that the lunatic, having fled downstairs, would find the newcomer's submarine.

She sprinted towards the doorway. The newcomer, apparently thinking the same thing as she, followed her as she went down the flight of stairs.

Awkwardly leaping over a collapsed beam on the ground, she rushed past the waiting area, sharply turning right and jumping down the next flight of stairs. The grenade loving thug was at the bottom, and tossed her another tin full of explosives, which thankfully sailed over her.

It exploded far behind her, followed by a scream, both of which Abby ignored as the splicer climbed into the submarine sticking out of the wall. She screeched into a stop just as she saw the splicer hold a lit grenade above his head, grinning like some deformed buffoon.

"I HAVE FOUND IT MISTER RYAN! I HAVE FOUND THE HOLY GRAIL!"

The ex-splicer barely have time to dive out of the way before the can detonated, along with the rest of the stuff in the box, throwing a shower of metal and plastic debris out of the sub's open hatch.

Regaining her footing, Abby approached the submarine. A sudden noise stopped her in her tracks.

From inside the machine, she heard a trickle of water and the horribly familiar groan of stressed metal.

She backpedalled as fast as one could with their arms cuffed behind them, and ran back the way she came, nearly tripping on something lying on the ground. She squinted through the darkness, and found it was the annoying newcomer.

She was on the floor, bleeding from a stomach wound.

Abby was in the process of leaving her when her ears picked up a sound. The wrecked machine gave a creek, not unlike a badly oiled hinge, that grew into a resounding groan, followed by the dying scream of tortured metal as the hull of the submarine gave in to six miles of ocean water.

Abby had a few moments to admire the frothing wave until it hit her, sweeping her and the screaming redhead off the ground. Struggling with the wall of water, Abby fought to keep herself from drowning.

Fortunately, ADAM hadn't taken the ability to swim from her. She kicked like a maniac, barely managing to keep afloat as the water surged through the bathysphere station, finally exploding out onto the lounge in a shower of spray as heavy doors sealed themselves in the stairway.

Abby, wormed her way across the floor, spitting seawater as she did so. She heard the newcomer gasp for air as she surfaced behind her.

Noticing her captor was distracted and hoping to capitalize on that, Abby pulled the lockpick she had in her sleeve and quickly opened the handcuffs, wondering why she didn't do this earlier.

_See? Told you it was left._

_No, it was on the right._

Throwing the things as far away as she could, she stood, eyes levelled on her captor. Picking the other girl up by the back of her sweater, she pinned her against the wall, holding her in place by the neck of her jersey.

The redhead wasted no time in protesting.

"Oy! Leggo-"

"Not till' you tell Abby what the hell you're supposed to be doing here!" The former splicer hissed.

The redhead growled. "I'm here to Decommission you, you eejit!"

Abby gave the other girl a violent shake "Enough with that already! WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING HERE!" she screamed.

"I'm not saying anything to you, teenager!" the redhead screamed, fear beginning to creep into her voice. "And you are getting me out of here, right now!"

Abby could almost feel her grip on reality slipping as her mind processed those.

Abby released her captor and turned to leave, a weird sound coming out of her throat. "Sorry ta break it to ya girl." She said, her voice interrupted by the wierd sporadic noise that came from her throat. "But you're not goin' anywhere... this is the worst place in the whole world...do ya really think Abby'd still be here if she could get outta here?"She wandered back the way they came, finally identifying the sound she was making.

She, Abigail Lincoln, was giggling. Not like a Little Sister though, she lacked the double voice of those minute monstrosities, and this giggling lack the playfulness of the Sister's.

Abby had to stop wondering about her giggling, because it had now degenerated into fits of hysterical laughter.

* * *

Fanny stood shock still, Abigail's laughing echoing through the glass tunnel as she got further and further away from her.

But, for once, she wasn't inclined to give pursuit.

If the dead body was her first true indication that something was wrong in this place, then Abby's shrieking laughter was what told her just how far down the rabbit hole the city had fallen. She gulped as she remembered reading Abby's file in the morning.

The cool, level-headed individual the computer screen had described was the farthest anyone could get to the maddened individual that had now collapsed with laughter on the floor.

Holding the wound on her side, she got closer to the teenager, and asked her:

"What the crud is going on in here?"

Abby held up a hand, eyes screwed shut in concentration as she seemingly fought for some measure of control. Finally, she answered.

"The whole city went nuts...Numbah five'd tell ya the whole story, but not here." She stood up, violently shaking her head. "Now's my turn, who the hell are you?"

Fanny was about to snark a retort, but she bit her tongue. Maybe the teenager really didn't remember anything at all.

"I... I'm Numbuh 86"

Abby narrowed her eyes for a second, before widening. After a second, she spoke.

"Follow me." She said, and strode through the tunnel, Fanny barely managing to keep up with her, her wound giving a dull pain.

"Hey! Wait for- Where the crud are we going?"

"Numbah five calls it home," the teenager said, the doors to the airlock opening, "and she's got a feelin' you'll be calling it that too."

"Oh, and, by the way: welcome to Rapture."

* * *

**Over four THOUSAND words... just so I could get Abby to say that last sentence.**

**A new record for me then!**

**Read, review, and tell me where I went wrong. If Abby feels OOC in some places, don't worry: It's intentional and justified, just like in Operation: A.L.O.N.E.**

**So that'll be it for Chapter 3, see ya!**


	4. How much is that Daddy in the window?

**Codename: Kids Next Door is property of Mr. Warburton, Bioshock is property of 2K games.**

**Sorry I couldn't update. It is the result of a bunch of situations that, frankly, do not ****concern any of you.**

**Now, can we please move on?

* * *

**

After a while, the adrenalin rush started to fade, and the wounds the grenade had given her started to register as pain.

It eventually got to the point that she had to stop. Numbuh five kept on walking, not noticing her absence until after she had into some restaurant.

She doubled back, exasperation written on her face.

"Now what?" she called out, "Did ya find another dead guy or somethin'?"

Fanny didn't answer; she was staring at her hands.

She was bleeding; blood had soaked through her green sweater. Some was dripping down on the floor.

She had seen her fair share of cuts and bruises as a medic and over her career as a commander.

But she had no idea someone could bleed so much.

She was only mildly aware that Abby was practically dragging her into the restaurant. She laid her out on the badly worn carpet, the banisters of a flight of stairs in front of her.

Abby crouched next to her and took a look at the wounds, lifting Fanny's sweater and blouse. She sucked her breath through the bandages.

"Now, you stay right here." She said, getting back to her feet, "Numbah five's gonna get something to help ya."

"Ho-how bad is it?" Fanny said, her voice beginning to tremble as the implications of a grenade wound started to sink in.

Abby shrugged, "Ah, nothing a med kit or two can't help." She said, and started walk away from her.

Fanny frowned and took a look at the wound herself. What she saw was an oblong, red _hole_ in her skin, pooling with blood. She managed a strangled scream.

"_Med-kit_?" she screamed, "Th-this isn't a game! I don't need a med kit, I need a cruddy _doctor_!"

Abby nearly tripped when she heard this, snapping her head back to stare at her like _she_ was the one out of her mind. She slowly shook her head.

"Oh, no you _don't_." she said, her voice alarmingly soft, "Trust Numbah five, you do _not_ want ta see a doctor here." She paused, and hurried of into a passage that had a broken sign saying "Restrooms".

Fanny tried getting up, mostly to tell her how insane she was, but was stopped by a jolt of pain from her midsection. She contented herself to gritting her teeth.

A minute or so passed, and Fanny was beginning to think that Abby had abandoned her. She narrowed her eyes, both in pain and suspicion.

_Cruddy teena__ger._

She was getting close to blacking out when she heard footsteps going up the stairs in front of her.

She called out for help and the footsteps stopped momentarily, before resuming, much more quickly now.

A man in grimy pants, tattered shoes and dirty white shirt trotted into her field of view. Fanny would have thanked him, but then she looked at his face.

It was as close to the definition of ugly as one could possibly get. The left side of his face was hard, almost like porcelain, and frozen in a smile that showed far too many teeth for comfort. The other side looked like melted plastic, the skin so saggy and loose that the guy had been forced to hold parts of it up with a handful of rusty safety pins. His mouth was twisted into something that might have been a huge grin, once upon a time. Bloodshot eyes stared at her.

"Now look at what we've got here, what a nice little lassie right on my doorstep." He muttered, his voice sounding almost metallic.

He twirled a rusty knife in his hand, his smile going all the wider as he knelt down next to her. Fanny squirmed away from him and a tumors filled, mottled hand seized the front of her sweater, pulling her into a seating position. The knife teetered dangerously close to her neck.

Fanny tried twisting out of the man's grasp. Any other day she would have succeeded, but unfortunately the wound had weakened her badly. She could only manage a meager struggle against him.

The knife touched her neck.

And then a bandaged hand slit the guy's throat with a meat hook.

* * *

Abby roughly pushed the dying splicer over to the side. He hit the floor with a solid _whack_. There were a few gurgling sounds, and he stiffened, lying in a small pool of blood.

Making a mental note to go through his pockets later, she waved the small, pencil case-sized tin in front of the very pale Numbuh 86, now also covered in Splicer blood

"Medkit." She stated, "Ought ta fix ya right up. Now, don't move a muscle."

Despite not having ever used a med-kit before, -the special organ Abby, along with some other Spider Splicers, possessed being enough to handle most injuries-, she had seen Numbuh One and Four -especially Four- use them enough times to have a moderate idea of what she was supposed to do.

She sat down next to Numbuh 86, popping open the metal lid of the thing. Inside was a wad of cotton soaked in alcohol in a small glass jar, dry cotton packed into a small cardboard box, a pair of pliers and a mouth-wateringly small syringe of medical-grade ADAM.

Abby stared at the lovely red goo for a moment.

_ADAM__ ADAM ADAM ADAM ADAM ADAM-_

_Take it! You know you want to. Leave the girl and take it!_

_Nigel will want to talk to her._

_Who cares about Baldy! Take the ADAM and RUN!_

_SHE'S TRYING TO KILL YOU! RUNRUNRUNRUN-_

_RUN-take the ADAM-HIDE-TAKE IT-HIDE-NIGEL IS WATCHING-HIDE-KILL HER__!_

Her hand trembled as it passed near the precious fluid. With a truly titanic effort, she wrenched her eyes from the pristine glass syringe and grabbed the box of cotton.

The voices screamed louder, and Abby did her best to ignore them.

Following the instructions on the inside of the metal lid, she started by moping of the blood from the wound. A piece of metal had lodged itself insede the wound, so she used the pliers to take it out.

Numbuh 86 had her face all scrunched up in pain.

She then opened the jar with the cotton soaked in disinfectant and cleaned the wound.

With a trembling hand, she picked up the ADAM sryinge. Slowly, fighting every step of the way, she stabbed the needle near the wound. Numbuh 86 gave a small yelp.

Abby pushed the plunger, slowly, until the ADAM got to work and the wound eerily closed shut, not even leaving a scar.

Abby removed the syringe, and stood up; helping a very bemused Numbuh 86 back on her feet. The redhead poked her stomach gingerly, mouth slightly open in surprise.

"Feelin' better?" Abby asked.

"Much." Numbuh 86 replied, still very surprised. She glanced at the dead Splicer, "Did you-"

"-kill him?" Abby finished for her. She gave a shrug. "Well, he was about ta cut ya into little pieces, so he was kinda askin' for it." she said.

Numbuh 86 went slightly red in the face, and muttered something akin to a "thank you", before taking up her previous, commandeering attitude.

"Now, you're going to stay _right here_, teenager! And when I come back you're gonna take me to sector headquarters on the double! Am I clear?"

Abby, with great difficulty, did not kill her. She just gave a sarcastic "Yessir".

The redhead gave her the best death glare she could under the circumstances, and walked purposefully towards the restroom.

Halfway there, she broke into a rather undignified run.

Abby rolled her eyes, muttering "newbie" under her breath. She looked at the glass syringe in the palm of her hand.

To her infinite joy, there was still some ADAM in it.

Wiping the needle clean with her sleeve, she rolled up her sleeve, jabbed the needle into a vein and pushed the plunger, with an ease anyone else would have found greatly disturbing.

The voices were immediately silenced.

Abby had once heard Numbuh Two ramble about how a small dose of ADAM would temporarily fix some of the wrongs larger doses of the same stuff did to you.

She felt good. Not ADAM-happy good, but more of a mended, stretching-after-you-woke-up kind of good.

Abby felt better that she had in weeks.

She hummed a song as she waited for Numbuh 86 to return

* * *

On the other side of Rapture, someone else wasn't feeling so carefree.

At all.

You probably know who I'm talking about by now.

Wallaby Beatles, AKA Numbuh Four, finally gave upon trying to find some sort of sense to the map that now rested in his pocket of his trench coat, neatly rolled up into a ball.

To clarify what is a rather odd piece of clothing, especially for a child: it had been "liberated" from an ex-Rapture cop that had, at the time, been engaged in attempting to bludgeon Numbuh Four to death with his baton. The unfortunate was-once-a-man accidentally fell from a balcony that lacked a railing (or parts of its floor) and had had the unbelievably bad luck of grazing a little sister on the way down.

There wasn't much of him left afterwards.

After the dust had settled, Wally, over Numbuh Two's insistence that he needed something from the 'Daddy that was "getting away", Numbuh One's constant comment about how suspicious he looked, and Numbuh Five's constant mention on how ridiculous he looked, he had taken the garment as his own, along with his share of the guy's wallet and food.

Wally had, rather crudely, cut the thing into something approximating his size, and had used some of the material to patch up the big hole in the back. The thing was still too wide, and the sleeves were not quite the same length and it didn't look _nearly_ as good as what he thought it did.

On a rather surprising flipside, it turned out to be very practical. There were a surprising amount of pockets inside, and he had stuffed every last one one of them with med-kits, food and ammunition for a shotgun he, sadly, hadn't found yet.

It still looked very silly.

That being said, he was currently trying to figure out where he was. Wally wandered down some of the more familiar-looking hallways.

He ended up at Volta Electronics, oddly enough. He scratched his head, wondering how he got there. He certainly hasn't taken any bathyspheres, or the Atlantic Express.

Wally blamed the map.

Seeing where he was now, Wally turned around to find the way home.

He suddenly heard the chillingly cheerful voice of a Little Sister.

"Look Mister Bubbles, look at all the pretty lights!"

Wally's eyes went as wide as saucers.

"Kuki?" he muttered in disbelief.

* * *

Fanny turned off the faucet in the ladies' room, muttering a few choice words in Gaeilgewhen she found that the towel was a filthy rag on the floor. She flicked a few wet locks of red hair away from her face and dried it on her sleeve.

Fanny's hands were shaking; it was beginning to dawn on her that she was stuck here in this insane place, with only this teenager and the rest of the useless Sector V for company.

She came out of the bathroom, definitely not feeling quite as sharp as she had this morning. The teenager was waiting for her just outside, twirling something in her hand.

She tried not to wince: it was a revolver, an adult weapon.

The teen stopped twirling the weapon just long enough to thrust it in front of her, grip-first. Fanny, with plenty of hesitation, took it. The weight of the thing felt unfamiliar in her hand. She missed her KND-issue blaster.

Abby quickly told her the basics of how the pistol worked, gave her a few pre-loaded cylinders and beckoned her to follow.

As they went through the ruined men's restroom (Fanny tried not to think about this too hard) she dared to ask:

"Where did you get this stuff?"

"From the jerk that tried to kill you."

Fanny recoiled, she had half a mind to simply toss the revolver away.

"You just-" she started.

Abby violently stopped and spun around to face her, her bandaged face a scant few inches from Fanny's own. She nearly walked right into the teenager.

"Now listen here," Abby said her voice dangerously level, "Numbah Five's got no idea what kinda world you come from, but in here, half of everything you own comes from somebody who's dead. Numbah Five don't like it any more than you do, and she'd rather not go around looking in anyone else's pockets, but in Rapture, we've got not much of a choice. The whole city's gone crazy, and everything's just fallin' apart…"

She resumed walking,still ranting as she ducked through a hole in the wall, coming out into what looked like the top of a theatre. Lights on metal girders shone down on the stage below, whilst the floor they were on overlooked both of them. Abby kept on talking, nimbly jumping down to the stage below, while Fanny carefully went over the girders to the other side of the room, and down a ruined flight of stairs, thankfully not missing anything of the other girl's monologue.

"…Well here's the plan: Numbah Five's gonna get you ta the safe house on Mercury suites, and if ya wanna get there alive, you've gotta follow some rules."

They passed through the Theatre entrance and through a hallway. Abby stopped talking until a group of people, just as deformed as the one that tried to kill Fanny, disappeared round a corner. Both of them crept on as stealthily as they could, watching from the large windows that overlooked the miniature plaza below as the handful of people disappeared to the right.

Abby continued from where she let off as they hurried downstairs through the ruined staircase and into a hallway. The sign on the wall read "Neptune's Bounty".

"Ok, rules. Rule numbah one: Stay the heck away Little Sisters-"

"What kind of a rule is that!" Fanny interjected as they slowed down to catch their breath.

Abby held up her hands, "Trust me, you'll know." She said. They reached a small room with a single spherical submarine, floating on top of a wide vertical column of seawater. Once they were inside, Abby continued.

"Rule numbah two: Numbah Five is your friend, and if Numbah Five tells ya something, you're gonna_ listen_. Ok? Rule numbah three: that gun is _also_ your friend, you're gonna be keepin' it loaded, and you're gonna be holdin on to it." She fired a pointed look at the redhead. "Got that sister?"

Fanny nodded, trying not to think about the lump of metal in her holster.

"Rule numbah four: Abby's friends are your friends too. And you don't shoot your friends." She paused, and added, "Except for Numbah Four, you can shoot _him_ plenty of times."

Fanny recoiled slightly. She looked at Abby, trying to see if she was joking.

She _hoped_ she was.

"Oh, I almost forgot, if ya start hearin' voices_, don't listen to them!_" She abruptly raised her voice, twisting around to face… whoever it was she though was behind her. "See? No one's gonna listen to _you_ now! NO ONE!" she screamed, managing, in those two words, to sound more hysterical that anyone Numbuh 86 had ever met.

Fanny cringed at this display. By the Rainbow Monkey god, Abby sounded as insane as freaking Numbuh 473.

…Well, maybe not _nearly_ insane as Numbuh 473. At least she hadn't professed a desire to rig the planet to explode.

_Yet_.

She decided it was best if she got Abby distracted in something that wasn't the voices in her head.

"So, how do we get this thing moving?"

Abby pointed at the raised panel on the back of the submersible. "You just pull this lever here. The whole thing's on autopilot, some of these thing only go between two places." She grinned as her hand closed on the leaver. "This 'sphere's got the scenic route to Neptune's. Hope ya like it!"

She pulled the leaver, closing the hatch and starting the submarine's journey into the depths.

* * *

"Bouncer" class Protector unit number 7748, was in what might have been a cheerful mood.

Then again, the Little One was safe and singing, so there was really no reason _not_ to be in a cheerful mood. For the 'Daddy, at least.

The Little One merrily skipped ahead of him, his own ponderous form a few feet away. Despite his appearance, he could move very fast when he needed. He simply didn't find any _reason_ to do so. The Little One probably also knew, but it didn't stop her from complaining.

"We need to find more Angels Mister bubbles!" she said, her black hair, the most intriguing feature this little one had, bobbed in the neat ponytail as she marched ahead of him.

He gave his response: a deep groan that echoed through the empty lobby.

"**GRAAAAAAAH**."

"Don't worry, Mister Bubbles, there's always Angels here!"

This little one seemed to like this place, and the 'Daddy had kept finding her here. He didn't mind.

The Little One sniffed the air, smiled, and hurried over to one of the several corpses.

"Look Mister Bubbles! An Angel!"

The Little One knelt beside the corpse and plunged the long needle into its neck. As she operated the ghastly apparatus, she hummed a peculiar song.

Soon, the Big Daddy found itself humming alongside her. The song was incredibly catchy.

He didn't mind.

* * *

There was a mechanical groan as the airlock door slid open on its tracks. The four armed hand crank jammed momentarily, refuse on the tracks jamming the wheels that once let it glide smoothly. With a sickening crunch of rubble and garbage being pulverized, and not a small amount of effort, it suddenly broke free of the obstruction and slammed into the wall.

Numbuh 86 rubbed her hands on her skirt. Why, if all the other doors were automatic, did _this one_ have to be manually wrenched open?

It was then that the smell hit her. A more observant individual would have noticed that the stench was similar to the stench caused by rotting meat, but Fanny wasn't an observant individual. She was an impatient hot head, and a kid to boot. She didn't _do_ observant.

She did, however, recognize the stench as the most god-awful smell she had ever come across.

"Holy... What _is_ that crud!" she cried, holding her sleeve to her nose in an attempt to filter out the stench. "Where is it coming from!"

Abby grimaced, and simply pointed at a bloated corpse on the floor.

Numbu 86 felt sick. "Let's get out of here." She said weakly.

"Numbah Five thinks we should." Abby agreed.

They quickly left the area, Abby didn't even bother searching the corpse's pockets.

Rather counter-intuitively, Neptune's Bounty referred to two different places in Rapture. There was the unloading area, where all the fish were collected from the submarines via airlock and hauled over to the neighboring market, and the submarine docking area, where the subs themselves were held, ready to tow huge nets through the ocean.

The docking area was massive, fairly larger than the Bathysphere Station where Numbuh 86 had arrived. A long, rectangular room, with two rows of four large pools with enough space for five of the submarines (now filled with refuse), and a truly massive window filled the longer walls, the thick glass reinforced by a grid of steel beams; one side looked into the ocean and the other gave a truly epic view of the city.

On the way there, Abby had explained that, after The Fall (whatever _that_ was), most of the Submersibles had been either sabotaged, or been seized by desperate civilians, only to be blown up by torpedo launchers situated around the city.

Whoever had been in the business of blowing up submarines had been really, _really_ good at their job. Hollowed husks drifted outside both windows, along with bloated bits of people.

The plan had been to use the Central Bathysphere hub in one of the lower levels of the Docks to head to Mercury Suites, where Sector V's Headquarters was located (Fanny was shocked to learn they hadn't built a proper Treehouse, but had kept it to herself, at least for now).

The short stairwell that had taken them from the Bathysphere Station opened into one of the shorter walls of the room. On the other end, Fanny could see the scissor gates of a heavy-duty elevator.

There was a cackle of static behind her. Abby unclipped a short-wave radio from her belt, and waved it around, trying to find a signal.

Numbuh 86 looked on in curiosity, as the Teen wandered through the room, waving the radio around, the static remained the same.

It wasn't until she pointed the device up that the continuous noise started clear ever so slightly.

Without a word, Abby clipped the radio bent her knees, and…_leaped_ into the ceiling, sticking to it like a freaking spider.

Fanny stared in fascination as Abby called down to her.

"Stay here, Numbah Five's gonna call ahead. Remember: if it's ugly, shoot it!"

The teen crawled around the ceiling. She then fiddled with what looked like an air vent, opening it, she disappearing inside.

After a few moments, Numbuh 86 recovered from the small shock of spider-teen's demonstration, and her training kicked in. Drawing the pistol from its holster, she held it in the ready stance so familiar to her.

She had to think tactically. Secure the area, cover the entrances, defuse booby-traps and ambushes, do _something__._

Considering how surreal the day had become, it was probably for the best she stuck to what she knew.

She gave the room a good sweep, opening some of the crates, getting a few candy bars, a battered med kit whose contents appeared reasonably intact, a pair of pre-loaded cylinders for her pistol, one of which had an orange band that claimed they were "anti-personnel rounds", and a pair of big, vial-like syringes filled with a blue, glowing liquid that the label called "Eve". She resolved to ask Abby about the last ones.

The area seemed reasonable safe; she found a place, in the center of the long glass window facing the ocean, where she could cover the bathysphere entrance and the elevator at the same time. Apparently, someone had had the same idea as her, and had moved a few empty crates there as cover. The only thing that was worrying was that a piece of debris had collided into the window facing the city, and the pane had gotten a long, thin crack in the process, which was now letting a trickle of water in.

Fanny sat down, her back resting on the cold glass, and waited.

_

* * *

_

_Accelerating playback: five minutes later._

* * *

A sound caught her attention: ponderous, heavy footsteps.

Numbuh 86's heart raced, she scrambled from her seating position and crouched behind one of the crates. The footsteps kept getting closer.

She risked a glance over the top of the crate, her eyes darting from one side of the room to the other. And then something caught her eye.

Outside, walking on the ledge of the window, was a man in a diving suit.

A big man, a really _big_ man.

He was carrying what looked like a toolbox on one hand, and a massive rivet gun on the other, hefting it by the handle someone had thoughtfully put on the top of the tool like a briefcase.

But what really caught Numbuh 86's eye was the helmet: a soft yellow glow emanated from the portholes.

Fanny carefully crept out of cover and towards the man, weapon at the ready. Just because she was curious, didn't mean she was _careless_.

The man stopped in front of the cracked window pane. Carefully, he set down his rivet gun and tool box, and started to work.

Numbuh 86 looked on in curiosity as the huge man opened the toolbox and picked inside. Even from her safe distance, the guy (at least, it _seemed_ like a guy. Fanny would prefer it if there was a girl under that helmet) looked way too big to be normal. He had to be at least seven feet tall.

The diving suit fellow pulled out what seemed to be a roll of metal and a handful of bolts. He unrolled the metal tube, reminding Numbuh 86 of the metal shutters people used to keep their shops locked and threaded the nuts through some pre-made holes. He pressed the metal plate to the pane, so that the edges of the thing rested on the metal surrounding the glass. He shifted the impromptu patch until he was satisfied, and unclipped a pistol like contraption from his back, applying it to each nut, tightening the seal the patch was making.

The trickle of water stopped.

The man in the diving suit stood back to admire his work, picked up his things, and left, his heavy footsteps marking his war. Never once did he even glance at the bemused girl who watched him work.

Fanny went back to where she was before, still waiting for Abby to come back. She never quite could get the sight of the huge man in the diving suit fixing a city that badly needed fixing, out of her head.

She absently wondered who it was.

* * *

**And that's that.**

**Four thousand two hundred and thirty nine words (at least, according to Word)… who said I can't write long chapters?**


End file.
